SLT has worked with a number of equipment manufacturers, including ZTE, testing LTE-A-Pro in a 'live network environment with real-world conditions'.

ZTE said it was the only vendor to achieve a peak throughput of over 1Gbps, using four component carrier aggregation, 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (256 QAM), and 4x4 multiple input multiple output (4x4 MIMO).

The vendor supplied its eWBB solution for the trial. ZTE's Massive MIMO product offers a peak rate of 720Mbps per carrier in a real commercial network - six times faster than a traditional TD-LTE carrier.

Sri Lanka Telecom launched TD-LTE services in 2014 and has been striving to increase its network capacity and quality as its user base grows.

SLT plans to use the eWBB solution to provide broadband services to the significant number of Sri Lankans who remain unconnected to the internet due to the high costs of fixed broadband coverage. This will also align with the government's National Broadband Policy.